Mountains in Gaming
How games utilize the natural world’s most impressive structures
Mountains are the biggest things I can think of. I know of bigger things (continents, planets, galaxies, the observable universe, etc.), but mountains are the biggest things I can truly think of. I’ve been on a mountain; I’ve seen mountains off in the distance on long car rides. I understand the size of mountains. As large as the earth is, I’ll most likely never have the privilege of seeing it from space or sailing around it. The size of the earth is not something I can internalize, nor is the vastness of the oceans nor the breadth of the continent I live on. Mountains lie just before the threshold of being too large to understand their greatness, but do not cross it. It is perhaps for this reason that video games have such an interesting relationship with mountains.
Expect details about the following games: Super Mario 64, FE Heroes, Celeste, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Pokémon Red and Blue, Animal Crossing (GCN), and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
Mountains as Guides
Video games have always used mountains to varying effect, but they emerged in prominence in the three-dimensional graphical boom of the mid-nineties. Before three-dimensional graphics became the norm in gaming, developers had one of two main ways of setting the camera for their game, “landscape” and “top-down.” Both of these had built-in ways of conveying where the player must go to proceed, but games that used three-dimensional space with manipulable cameras did not.
Top-down games were able to transition into 3D somewhat gracefully, but landscape-style franchises had a tougher time. In a landscape game like Super Mario Bros., the level simply ended. There was a linear pathway Mario was locked to and it terminated at a flagpole, signifying Mario’s success. Some 3D games like Crash Bandicoot and Rayman 2 mimicked this by condensing their levels into traditional pathways. They may have wide rooms and they may be serpentine in shape, but they were still linear and, as such, did not maximally utilize the open, volumetric space that being in 3D provided.
Super Mario 64 did maximally use that space, though, and had a pretty nifty way of guiding the player around: mountains. A cube has no “end” and Super Mario 64’s levels are essentially cubes, but if there’s a mountain, there is a point of reference that can be used by the level designer to build upon. Here are all the levels in the game and whether or not mountains were used in their design.
- Bob-omb Battlefield: This is the first level Mario has access to. The first mission in this level, “Big Bob-omb on the Summit,” has Mario climbing a central mountain to reclaim a Power Star from King Bob-omb. In the process of climbing the mountain, Mario passes by every key point in the level, introducing the player to their surroundings in a stress-free, comprehensive way. There are no bottomless pits here, so falling off the mountain is not punished severely. This mountain is designed entirely with the goal of easing the player into 3D gaming. Subsequent missions in this level involve Mario climbing the mountain in a certain amount of time, launching himself off of the mountain, and collecting red coins from around the mountain, teaching the player about optimal movement, how to judge distances in 3D, and that exploration often yields rewards.
- Whomp’s Fortress: Whomp’s Fortress is essentially a floating mountain. Climbing the mountain is about as easy to do as in Bob-omb Battlefield, but now has the risk of bottomless pits. The goal of most missions in this world is to climb the mountain and do a key activity at the top. This can get repetitive, but allows for the practice of the basic movement options at Mario’s disposal that may have seemed alien to players who weren’t used to 3D gaming in the mid-nineties.
- Jolly Roger Bay: There are no mountains in this level. This level also sucks. Coincidence? I think mount.
- Cool, Cool Mountain: Like Whomp’s Fortress, Cool, Cool Mountain is a floating mountain. Unlike Whomp’s Fortress, however, Mario starts at the peak of the mountain rather than at the base. Many of the Cool, Cool Mountain missions are about going down the mountain. One involves using a central slide that cuts through the core of the mountain while another uses the same slide, but faster. There is even a mission in which Mario limits his movement options by carrying a baby penguin down to its mother at the base. These activities are a jump up in difficulty from what the player was doing in previous levels, but this is still classified as one of the easy levels because doing these things while venturing down a mountain is much easier than doing so going upward.
- Big Boo’s Haunt: This level has a mountain… kind of. Big Boo’s Haunt takes place in and around a haunted mansion. The first mission has the player exploring the ground floor of the mansion. Upon completion of this mission, a set of stairs will appear linking the ground floor with the second floor. The next few missions all involve exploring the newly-expanded mansion’s other areas. By the fifth mission, the balcony is made accessible. On the balcony, Mario must fight Big Boo and collect a star from the roof. In doing all this, Mario has climbed a large structure to ultimately reach its peak. Call me crazy, but that’s a mountain. Here, the traditional Mario 64 centralized mountain is recontextualized as a house in order to let the player explore a system of rooms, something they have not yet done in the game, while retaining the vertical orientation and landmark status of a real mountain.
- Hazy Maze Cave: This is the first level found in the basement of Peach’s Castle, which is only accessible after defeating Bowser the first of three times. This indicates that going from the ground floor to the basement is the first major jump in difficulty in the game and Hazy Maze Cave delivers on that indication. Hazy Maze Cave has no mountain, but that’s kind of the point. This is a true maze. It is purposefully difficult to navigate. There are segmented rooms, winding hallways, and disorienting jumps in elevation all designed to force the player to make a mental map of where they are and where they have been. The centralized mountain archetype is a crutch that the game has been giving the player and is now taking away. The player has always been able to look at the mountain and reorient themselves. Removing it here forces the player to be a bit more diligent in their path-finding.
- Lethal Lava Land: A small volcano makes up the center of Lethal Lava Land. When viewed from the outside, I woudn’t consider it a mountain. It’s too small and doesn’t work like a mountain in this game usually does. Mario can enter the volcano, however, and inside, he’s greeted with a pair of perilous platforming paths. All of a sudden, this is a mountain. Going inside the central mountain first appeared in Big Boo’s Haunt, but this is the first time the size of the space inside the mountain wasn’t apparent from the outside. This creates an element of surprise upon entering the volcano.
- Shifting Sand Land: The pyramid in this level is a mountain. Like Lethal Lava Land and Big Boo’s Haunt, this level has you climbing the mountain from the inside. There is treacherous terrain surrounding the outside of the pyramid in the form of quicksand, much like LLL’s lava, and the space inside the pyramid is much larger than it appears, also like in LLL. The main difference from LLL is that Shifting Sand Land is mostly the space inside the pyramid with some extra area around its perimeter while LLL is mostly the space outside of the volcano with a bit of extra space on the inside. This increased focus on the inside of the pyramid plants the seed for a more flexible understanding of mountains that will be expanded upon near the end of the game.
- Dire, Dire Docks: Another water level. Another level without a mountain. Another bad level.
- Snowman’s Land: There is a giant snowman in the center of this level that must be climbed in multiple missions, so that’s a mountain. What’s interesting about this mountain specifically is that the snowman doesn’t actually want Mario to climb it and attempts to physically blow Mario off. Introducing the idea of giving the mountain free will of its own this late into the game is bold and is expanded upon as a concept in the next few levels.
- Wet-Dry World: Mario can affect the water level of Wet-Dry World, the only good water level in the game, by entering the level at different heights. Hi-jumping into the painting raises the water level to it’s maximum while hopping in near the bottom of the painting lowers it to it’s minimum. The water level can also be altered in the world itself by activating certain water symbols. There is a mountain in this level and it’s placement is unique. Instead of being in the center of the level, the mountain’s side leans into a single corner of the space. The combination of the water rising and lowering around this hillside make for a mountain of variable height. It doesn’t have its own will like the snowman in Snowman’s Land, but the player’s will can act upon the mountain and shape it to be most convenient for Mario to traverse it. It’s at this point in the game where the mountain goes from guiding the player to being guided by the player, which is an exciting way to narratively show how the player has grown.
- Tall, Tall, Mountain: This level is literally just a big mountain. It functions much like the earlier floating mountain levels like Whomp’s Fortress or Cool, Cool Mountain. Each mission leads Mario a bit further up the mountain with the last few actually leading all the way to the peak. This level design creates a narrative arc, constantly pushing Mario upward. This was previously seen in Big Boo’s Haunt, but is now actually being used on what is classically considered a mountain, rather than just a house acting like a mountain.
- Tiny-Huge Island: This level is a logical extension of the set-up from Wet-Dry World. Once again, the way Mario enters the world affects the level itself and, by extension, the mountain within it. This time, Mario jumping in the tiny portrait leads him to a shrunken version of the level, which is yet another floating mountain, and jumping into the larger portrait leads him to an enlarged version of the mountain. This mountain bends to the player’s will, but much less than in Wet-Dry World. Here, the mountain can either be too large or too small for most of the things Mario needs to do. It’s never comfortable. It’s almost as if the mountain is fighting back, letting Mario know that this is still supposed to be a challenge. This mountain is still guiding the player, but it’s guiding them toward challenge, rather than toward ease.
- Tick Tock Clock: One of the two final levels in the game, Tick Tock Clock is the ultimate mountain. It utilizes many of the tools developed by previous levels’ mountains. It’s full of opportunities to fall down a bottomless pit like in Cool, Cool Mountain and Tall, Tall Mountain; it’s a mountain recontextualized as a man-made object like in Big Boo’s Haunt (this time as a grandfather clock); it takes place inside the mountain rather than on top of it like in Shifting Sand Land and Lethal Lava Land; and it is augmented by the way Mario enters the level like in Wet-Dry World and Tiny-Huge Island. While the player has been growing in skill throughout their playthrough, the central mountain in the center of each level has been growing in complexity to meet them, culminating in this platforming gauntlet.
- Rainbow Ride: This is the final level in the game and the hardest. Everything mountains do for a Super Mario 64 level would just make this level easier and this isn’t the time for that. Besides, the mountain design of Super Mario 64 maxed out in Tick Tock Clock. So, there is no mountain. There is no central landmark to orient a new player. There is no guiding force upward. There is no vertical narrative trajectory. There is only a bottomless pit and the hope that the previous levels’ mountains have prepared the player for the toughest challenges the game has to offer. The mountain has been Mario’s guide, but this is Mario’s destination.
Totaling that up, only four of Super Mario 64’s fifteen main levels aren’t about mountains. Two of them, Hazy Maze Cave and Rainbow Ride, are defined by their lack of mountains while the other two, Jolly Roger Bay and Dire, Dire Docks, are largely uninteresting water levels. Even they, however, could be argued to be inverted mountains filled with water. This is a game very much about mountains and what they can do for a player new to 3D graphics in video games. Mountains guide the player and there is no better example of this than Peach’s Castle itself.
Mario starts at the bottom floor of the castle and continually makes his way higher and higher until he reaches Bowser on the highest floor. Even after that, Mario can go around to the levels he missed and collect all the remaining Power Stars, opening up a cannon that can shoot to the roof of Peach’s Castle, the peak of the mountain that is Super Mario 64.
Mountains as Challenges
“Patience is the foundation of eternal peace. Make anger your enemy. Harm comes to those who know only victory and do not know defeat. Find fault with yourself and not with others. It is in falling short of your own goals that you will surpass those who exceed theirs.” - Tokugawa Ieyasu
The above quotation is featured in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, a game prominently featuring a mountain. Here’s another one:
“An orange is a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It’s coffee, it’s grapefruit, it’s licorice.” -Bennett Foddy
Between these two thoughts, the mountain Bennett Foddy built materializes. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is about frustration. The player character, an Adobe Fuse stock character model whose lower body is stuck in a pot, moves only by anchoring himself off of the ground using a hammer. The player can control where that hammer goes using the mouse, which is an incredibly frustrating, fragile affair. That’s not where the frustration ends, though.
Upon starting the game, the player is faced with a mountain and Bennett Foddy’s voice is first heard. He warns the player that climbing the mountain will be difficult and that if they were in poor spirits before they booted the game up, they should probably wait until they are in a better mood. Foddy’s voice is constantly heard as the player makes their way up the mountain. When the player falls from a great height, progress is automatically saved, making the prospect of losing hours of progress in a fraction of a second a very real, very probable possibility. When this happens, Foddy is there to console the player in their time of frustration or to share an inspirational quote about how “failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
After a while, Foddy’s “encouragement” itself ironically becomes another source of frustration. After a longer while, Foddy says that he’s going to leave the player alone for a while and cuts off commentary until they advance further up the mountain. The silence that ensues is yet another cause for frustration.
None of this frustration would amount to much if not for the imposing nature of the mountain that must be climbed. It is full of sheer walls with tiny protrusions that the end of the hammer needs to wrap around, overhangs that send the player straight back to the beginning of the game should they fall, and “kind offers” to allow the player to never actually reach the peak of the mountain, like a snake the player can use to slide down to where they started hours earlier. I didn’t understand the purpose of the snake until I viewed it through the lens of Foddy’s description of a challenge.
The mountain is a bitter peel. Most of this game is grapefruits, licorice, and coffee. It’s fully bitter. Climbing the mountain is not traditionally “fun” and the player’s progress is never saved. No progress is permanent until the very end of the game, but reaching the end is satisfying. Arriving at the top of the mountain is a pleasurable experience, which does not conform to Foddy’s description of a challenge in the strictest sense. In a way, riding the snake down to the beginning of the game is the true ending. That way, the mountain never turns into an orange.
It’s also possible, however, that Foddy was simply posturing when he was talking about challenges because he makes it very clear that he’s glad the player eventually makes it to top of the mountain. Close to the peak, he says this:
“You’ve learned to hike. There’s no way left to go but up and in a moment I’ll shut up, but let me say: I’m glad you came. I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far. I give it to you with all my love.”
Foddy is rejoicing in being able to share a moment of pleasure with the player. In designing Getting Over It, Foddy needed to be a strong antagonistic force in order to create the kinds of true grapefruit-esque challenges that comprise the mountain. It’s perhaps in not taking the snake back to the beginning of the game that the player signals to Foddy that they are done with challenges and Foddy adapts to fulfill the needs of the player. Only when the player decides that they don’t necessarily need to continue being challenged is when the mountain is allowed to reach its peak and, by extension, a satisfying end for the player. The mountain is challenge and challenges must be completable.
Mountains as Semi-Permeable Boundaries
More often than actually being traversable, mountains are walls that confine the player. In fact, this might be the most common use of mountains in gaming.
In real life, mountains aren’t something commonly traversed for fun. Roads bend around them. Buildings are usually found at their bases, not their summits. Mountain ranges take too much time and energy to be crossed casually. Because of this, they are commonly used to show the player where they can’t go.
In this screenshot from Fire Emblem Heroes, mountains are used to visually indicate which spaces aren’t crossable by foot, but are crossable by use of a flying steed like a pegasus.
Here, in each of the four above maps, we see a mountain range concealing the northern reaches of the map. Note how common it is to see a hillside in the north and a shore in the south. There are a couple reasons that I suspect this might be the case. Traditionally, top-down games are actually viewed from a 3/4ths angle off the ground in order to show heights, meaning that something in the highest section of the map can be very tall without obstructing the view of anything important while the bottom section of the map needs to be very low in altitude in order to not be in the way.
In all of these cases, mountains are understood to be boundaries. While a player invested in the world of a video game might take issue with the fact that the main characters of the game cannot simply climb up these structures and escape to new ares, they are also likely to forgive the developer for this limitation. At some point, the development of a game needs to end and the world map needs to have a line in which the player cannot cross unless they are randomly generating procedurally-assembled infinite levels, which is a relatively new trend. In any case, it’s understood that video game maps need to end and that mountains are a shorthand for doing so.
This tradition makes what The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does all the more exciting.
In Breath of the Wild, Link can climb anything, simultaneously elevating the importance of mountains and diminishing mountains’ stopping power. Climbing a tall mountain is an ordeal, but very doable. Stamina must be managed while Link climbs, but stamina can be upgraded by fulfilling optional side-quests and replenished using special food. Sometimes the peaks of mountains in Breath of the Wild hold hidden Korok Seeds or Shrines to complete, but that’s all extra. What makes these mountains most special is that they are optional.
Almost everything in Breath of the Wild is optional, in fact. The final-boss-housing end-game dungeon, Hyrule Castle, is clearly visible from the starting point of the game and is immediately accessible. It would likely be too difficult for a beginning player to go straight from the tutorial area to the fight with Calamity Ganon, but it’s entirely possible. When played this way, the mountains of Breath of the Wild might as well be the mountains of Kanto or Animal Crossing, boxing in the player’s allotted area. It’s in these mountains’ climbability that the game becomes open-world (or “open-air,” as Nintendo calls it).
Approaching what is typically a boundary and carefully crossing over it creates a respect in the player’s mind for any area past that boundary. Suddenly, a city isn’t just a city; it’s a hidden city. While not actually very well hidden, Kakariko Village feels like a very secretive place, being surrounded on all sides by tall cliffs. In serving as boundaries and then letting the player pass, the mountains of Breath of the Wild create the sense of discovery and fulfill the promise of adventure.
Mountains as Whatever They Need To Be
Celeste is a game about a mountain, and the reason for this article’s existence. It is the story of a woman attempting to climb a mountain simply because she feels compelled to do so. Even she doesn’t know exactly why. She suffers from severe self-doubt, anxiety, and depression and has internalized the idea that climbing this mountain will somehow create a previously absent sense of self-worth. By the end of the game, she becomes strong enough to climb the mountain, but only by first truly accepting the parts of herself she doesn’t like.
You would be forgiven for thinking that this game’s protagonist is named Celeste. She is not. She is named Madeline. The mountain is Celeste. Even though the story is about the woman, the game is about the mountain.
There is another character in the game named Theo, a social media-addicted Seattleite also dedicated to climbing Mount Celeste. His reasons for climbing the mountain are completely different from Madeline’s. He felt trapped in his everyday life and has made a point to take as many pictures of the mountain as possible. For him the mountain is a model. For Madeline, it’s medication. For the developer, it’s an achievement in game design. For a fan of platformer games, it’s a complex platforming environment. For a speedrunner, it’s a collection of patterns of mechanics to master. For a narrative-focused player, it’s the stage for an introspective drama about a young woman coming to terms with her own emotional fortitude. Mount Celeste is always what it needs to be.
Video games are a three-way conversation between the player, the systems of the game, and the developer. In development, a game’s creator may try to isolate a concept from their lives or an idea they had and attempt to add it to the game. The software interprets what the creator’s intent was (to some extent) and attempts to represent it within the game. Then, a player sees that representation and either guesses what it was meant to symbolize or takes its final state for what it is.
This is all to say that I’ve only guessed at what the purpose of the mountains spoken about above actually are. I’ve taken ideas from game creators, abstractly represented in software, and interpreted them through my own lens. Then, I attempted to translate it once more into communicable meaning in this article. Once you read this, reader, each mountain described in this article will have been translated three times and each translation could be described as guess-work at best.
Still, this is how I think about these mountains. Just as Theo and Madeline need to climb the same mountain for radically different reasons, developers use the same structures for radically different reasons and players will interpret those structures differently from game to game. This is the nature of filtering real-world experiences through the medium of art creation. All humans start life on the same earth, but our interpretations of that earth vary depending on the context with which it is viewed.
In all of the above examples of how mountains are used in video games, choosing to specifically talk about mountains has been mostly arbitrary. Super Mario 64, Getting Over It, Fire Emblem, Breath of the Wild, and Celeste all also use bridges in interesting ways as well. I could have talked about how these games treat mountains, bridges, water, or pretty much anything else with the same amount of depth. I chose mountains because they are large and natural. No one has ever built a mountain and no one has ever watched a mountain die, so very few people have more critical information about mountains than anyone else. Some may know about how plate tectonics form them or about the chemicals in the dirt that they are made up of, but this is all trivial when asking the question “What does a mountain do?”.
All of these developers had their own answers and, in the study of those answers, a sliver of truth about the way they view the world we share emerges.
